I Had to Forgive My Mother to Move On
Life was a disaster until I learned this.
Marie And Me, Part One
She evaporated in a puff of smoke when I was barely 18 months old. Like many kids who grow up without any knowledge of a parent, I wondered what I did to cause her to bail.
Silly, I know (now). All I did back then was toddle around and struggle to master toilet training. And eat. A lot.
She popped in and out of my life infrequently until I was around six. Much like the photo above, those memories are fuzzy, monochromatic snapshots in my mind now.
One snatch of memory reveals us celebrating my fourth birthday one-on-one at Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor on the lower level at McCain Mall. In another, I’m five and we’re making brownies in her tiny kitchen as Little House on the Prairie drones on from her 13-inch black and white TV tucked under her faded, chipped kitchen cabinet next to the stove.
My last childhood memory of my mother is the worst: her clutching me by the back of my neck as my dad pulls into her driveway to pick me up from a very brief Christmas Day visit. He was five minutes past the agreed-upon pickup time — a fact she very loudly took him to task for.
“I’m not your f***ing babysitter!” she spat out from around the filter of her half-smoked Marathon cigarette. “Don’t come back here until you can learn to be on time!”
She half-pushed me toward him, threw a “Love you, son!” over her shoulder, and slammed the front door behind her.
Ten years passed before I saw her face again.
After that episode, I never asked my father again why she didn’t want to see me. He has since told me that he was grateful for that episode — it relieved him of the need to explain to me why she was not around.
“You were finally old enough to see it for yourself,” he said. “Maybe you didn’t fully understand it, but you definitely experienced it that day.”
A New Beginning
He remarried when I was nearly eight years old. He was out of town one weekend and met the love of his life in a restaurant.
He fell head over heels for her almost at first sight. They began an intense courtship that lasted all of two months. She brought her daughter with her one weekend to meet me, and married four weeks later. Two years after that, they had a baby together that set our family at five.
Dad traveled a lot in those days, which left me and my new mom with plenty of time to learn how to coexist. Those early years were rough — regardless of what we told ourselves, I simply wasn’t hers and it showed in her lack of patience with me.
She wasn’t mine either, and I wasn’t afraid to act accordingly.
Each time Dad returned home from a trip, he would convene court. Sometimes I was the plaintiff, sometimes she was. I couldn’t see it at the time, but those arbitrational sessions were an important part of our relational development.
Gradually, my mom and I came to understand that our life together was not temporary. As I worked through my early-teen hormonal hurricane and she became more balanced in her approach to all of her kids, we came to understand each other a little more.
The more I listened, the more patient she was with me. The more nurturing she became, the more obedient I was.
The more all of that happened, the less stressed my dad was. Which improved life for all of us.
Marie And Me, Part Two
Dad gained a little statewide notoriety in 1991, the year I turned 16. He was on the front lines of the personal computing revolution, which brought with it a threat that would only get worse as society increasingly embraced the power of fingertip technology: computer viruses.\
One of the three television network affiliates in Little Rock interviewed him after our only statewide newspaper ran a piece on his efforts to combat this threat. He gave a short, but highly informative interview on this issue. They posted our home phone number on the screen below him for anyone who wished to enlist his services.
Two days after the interview was broadcast, our home phone rang for the first time. This call would disrupt life as my whole family knew it for months to come.
The way Dad told it, Marie was desperate to see me. She felt tremendously guilty for not being a part of my life and wanted to make up for lost time by giving me money — enough to buy a car with, at that.
More curious than anything, really, I agreed to take a meeting with her. We set up a lunch date at The Kettle, a popular local restaurant on the outskirts of Little Rock one Thursday afternoon. I actually missed school that day, something I had not done a single time in more than four years.
She blew into the restaurant in a mixed cloud of drugstore perfume and residual cigarette odor. She was 15 minutes late for our appointment, a fact that was not lost on me in light of our very last meeting some 10 years earlier.
She barked out a coffee order to the waitress, dismissed her with the backward wave of one hand, and favored me with a cold stare.
“You’re tall,” she said. “And you look nothing like your father.”
Those were the first words she had spoken to me in nearly a decade, and they were not kind. They were the last words she offered to me for nearly an hour. She disregarded me for most of the rest of that meeting, opting instead to awkwardly reminisce with my father about how great the 1970s had been.
When she finally got back around to me, she leveled with me about the real reason for this meeting.
“My grandmother is dying,” she said matter-of-factly. “She has demanded that I make sure all of my children come to see her before she dies. If I don’t, I will not inherit her estate.”
Money. That was the reason.
She informed me that there would be something in it for me if I played ball: $5,000, to be exact. As a down payment of sorts, she offered me a tarnished brass broach her deceased mother had left her. She upsold the item as a time-honored, generational heirloom that was priceless.
I glanced over at my father, who was watching this conversation closely. We shared an unspoken moment of understanding in that moment: he refrained from intervening and trusted me to respond from my own heart.
I politely declined both the broach and the money. I wasn’t here to do business, after all. I was here for answers, and it was apparent that I would never get those from her. Dad and I agreed on the way home from that lunch that I would never see the money Marie was promising anyway.
I went to visit my biological great-grandmother, and never told Marie I was doing it. I came away from that visit with a much more clear understanding of exactly what tree my mother had fallen out of.
A Fitting End
The last time I spoke to Marie, I was 38 and within two days of witnessing the birth of my third child. She copped my phone number from Facebook and cold-dialed me, as was apparently her way. She was in failing health and felt I should know.
True to her nature, she was not the slightest bit interested in me, my children, or anything not having to do directly with her. She was not calling to have a conversation — she had apparently burned up everyone else she knew and turned to me. She needed an emotional toilet to dump into and I was all that was left.
She clung on to life for another five years before finally expiring in February of 2021. A series of strokes rendered her completely mindless, speechless, and permanently detached from any semblance of lucidity.
The last one, several months before her death, slammed a decisive door on any hope that we might still talk out our differences and pave a road of understanding between us.
I don’t know if she ever found any healing in her heart or her spirit, but mine came as a result of her death. I do know that she suffered no more from physical pain, and I was finally able to move on from a lifetime of bitterness.
I learned a valuable lesson about forgiveness in the wake of her death: the other person never has to ask for it, or even be around to receive it. You simply have to give it.
When I finally decided to forgive her after all those years, I wasn’t releasing her from what she both did and didn’t do in my life. I was simply releasing myself from the emotional distress of it all.
I spent my whole life to that point marinating in my own misery, then taking it out on others.
If I hurt someone and they called me out on it, I became defensive and turned on them, exacerbating the situation. If someone hurt me, I ran for the hills. It never occurred to me that there was a reason Marie could not connect with me emotionally, and I never thought to ask her that question when she could still physically answer it.
The fact is, she was a true product of her beloved 1970s. Culturally, there was a lot going on in those days. The Vietnam War was still a fresh wound, as was the Watergate scandal. The economy was in shambles. Many people coped with all of this in some very destructive ways, including recreational drug use.
Marie was an enthusiastic practitioner of that coping mechanism. No, that doesn’t excuse what she did to my dad and me, or the decades of self-involvement and neglect of her children, but it does at least partially explain it.
See, in order to forgive her, I had to understand a few things. For one thing, I came to realize that being a shattered shell of a human being one’s whole life doesn’t just fall from the sky.
I spoke with people who really knew her, and that helped me to understand for the first time in my life that I wasn’t her problem — she was.
That understanding changed my entire life. Once I opened that creaky door in my mind, I came face to face with some hard truths about myself. I was 45 years old, divorced more than once, and had been telling myself for most of my adult life that all of that was Marie’s fault.
“My mother never loved me,” I reasoned. “Of course I didn’t know how to love others!”
I was racking up quite a bill with my own shortcomings — one that I expected her to stand good for. I knew she would never own up to anything, so I subconsciously passed the cost for being a broken man on to anyone else who tried to love me.
This led to a lot of breakups, which in turn embittered me to the point that each next relationship was doomed to fail before they even started. The vicious cycle was stuck on Repeat.
She was gone, as were most of the people who ever tried to find a decent man inside of me. I cannot go back and fix any of those relationships now, but I still have a responsibility to my current wife, my children, and myself to find the forgiveness that has always sorely lacked in my story.
I needed to forgive Marie, but first I had to forgive myself.
I was guilty of every bad thing I ever did in my adult life, and I was guilty of passing the blame for all of it on to her. She seemed a convenient junk drawer for all of my failures, both because I needed an excuse and because she wasn’t around to answer for any of it.
She wasn’t around for the skinned knees, the tears, my first high school breakup, my first divorce…
The few times she was around, she had nothing but unkind words and ulterior motives to offer me. I carried all of that around for years, using it as a convenient excuse to be a bad husband, father, and person in general.
All I ever really had to do was just stop hating her for those things, and in turn stop hating myself for what I did to others. Once I was finally able to release her from them, a burden instantly left me. I was finally able to forgive myself for the decades I wasted on this sad tale.
Well into my 40s, I finally realized it was time to grow up, let go, and love fiercly and fearlessly.
